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SolarWinds AppOptics vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SolarWinds AppOptics
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
57th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
43rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (58th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of SolarWinds AppOptics is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.9%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

John Yuko - PeerSpot reviewer
Unique features allow consolidating and combing metrics into a single dashboard, but don't monitor mobile solutions
I would like to see more granular information provided on Unix applications. Also, the integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward in terms having an agent to retrieve your credentials rather than having to enter or save them for SSH on SolarWinds. From the outset, we had to set some commands to log into the search console, and they are saved on the solution, which presents a challenge in terms of exposure. The solution is unable to monitor APK solutions completely because we'd then be forced to break down the APK and provide the APIs or go through the source code. They don't have a module that can analyze an application that is maybe under-used.
Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The reporting of the solution is very good."
"I have found the most valuable feature is application performance management."
"Some of the most valuable features of SolarWinds are the topology discovery and network performance analysis."
"The product has a great dashboard."
"Technical support is always live and they're supportive."
"The sum solution, NTA, and DPA."
"It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network."
"I love the GUI. Almost everything is accessible through the web interface. It is very user-friendly. It is easy to drag and drop resources wherever you want them."
"The abnormal traffic notifications are good. Most of them are remote, and it is very good for notifications and monitoring for the traffic."
"This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments."
"There are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports."
"The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products."
"The other valuable system is the DSS (decision support system). If there's a fault in the network, SolarWinds is basically capable of rectifying and resolving that problem on its own without any intervention from an IP assistant or administrator."
"SolarWinds NPM provides an overview of network monitoring, extending its capabilities to cover other aspects, such as virtual machines and servers. The platform has features like NetPath, which is particularly beneficial for end-users, offering insights into issues like latency, packet loss, and connectivity problems with routers, switches, or servers."
 

Cons

"In terms of the technology, I think they need to put some more advanced troubleshooting into SolarWinds, in terms of AI capabilities. That's the next generation, especially in the cases of APIs which have already adopted AI capabilities into their products."
"The integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward."
"The solution should be more user-friendly."
"The implementation needs improvement. It needs to get modernized with the newer cloud scenario in both public and private deployment models."
"I would like to see more integration with other tools that are available on the market."
"AppOptics would benefit from having a much more centralized view."
"The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like."
"The solution could be more secure."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools."
"A feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows."
"The solution is not always good with new features, so it's take a long time."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Mostly, it's a perpetual license. We don't have any customers using the subscription right now—it's mostly a perpetual license that the customers purchase. The licensing is based on the number of elements, whereas other solutions are node-based."
"I believe the current licensing cost is reasonable."
"Since it's a negotiable rate, I would rate the pricing as a five out of five."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."
"Quite highly priced"
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine."
"The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
"The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
37%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
 

Also Known As

AppOptics, SolarWinds TraceView, Librato
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TraxoCovea Insurance BTE TechnologyDatarista
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds AppOptics vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.